cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/28095114
Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.
But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.
Look this is simple: There is no legitimate need to use AI to do anything, let alone anything you take seriously and/or you’d want to charge money for.
So if you’re not just being a paid shill then why kill your reputation by attaching your name and company to ANY amount of sloppy shit?
Just don’t do it.
Apart from getting tasks done faster.
Ultimately the litmus being AI or not is stupid. The test is the same test weve always had. Is it good.
If its bad, rate it shit and move on.
You can make good shit with AI if you actually review what its done, understand it and tweak it. Its a force multiplier not a replacement for your own lack of skill.
There’s plenty of reasons to use ai. There’s just no reason at all to only use ai.
That’s the difference. And one that for some fucking reason all but like 2 studios seem to have fucking figured out.
Expedition 33 had ai tool usage. But that’s the entire fucking point. They used it as a tool. Still came out as one of the best fucking jrpgs in years.
Bitching about ai usage as if any amount ruins everything. Is like bitching that using a power tool ruins a whole fucking house and we should all keep using hand tools.
It makes zero fucking sense. Just stop fucking expecting the machine that is explicitly not perfect to be perfect. Treat it like a fucking tool. And actually do your god damn job instead of trying to replace people.
It’s a fucking power tool, not some machine spirit that can shit out a perfect product.
at the very least don’t use it for the the most visibly apparent components of a game. Having it stub out scaffolding for underlying systems in the code is one thing, using it for visual assets is just dumb
This just shifts the problem to a new location. Don’t use it for art, or scaffolding, or code, or concepts, or anything a person gets paid to do or a different person expects a human touch from.
AI is a fine search engine, it doesn’t need to eat the world.
‘Dammit genie you get back in that bottle right now!’
It is NOT fine as a “search engine”. If you even read AI summaries you’re dumber this year than you were last year.
To be fair, ai summarys and using it as a search engine are two VERY fucking different tasks. Like night and fucking day.
It also doesn’t help the ai models in charge of the summaries on most search engines are some of the stupidest lowest quality pieces of shit we have.
A model told to actually do a search properly is functionally no different than if you or I did it. And will actually be able to do the job properly. They are very good at this sorta work load.
You ask it to go though a bunch of summaries then summarize those summaries and do use in like 1 seconds. You of course are getting fucking slop.
You aren’t giving it the time or information needed to do the fucking job right. They arnt magic machines they can’t do shit instantly.
I’m sorry, but I’m certain that the average AI summary beats/matches what the average person gets from a normal search. You’re acting like people before AI didn’t just believe whatever the first or second link told them, for most cases.
If you’ve ever even read the summary of a study, you’re in the top 10% of “people that research online”.
So basically people burn more energy while doing the same shit as before. Yeah you’re really selling it. Generally we should be fixing stupidly instead of letting billionaire parasites leach off of it.
It sucks as a search engine. When I’m searching for something, I want factual, correct results, not a hallucinated answer which is backed up by none of its sources.
When I click through search results, I’m reading, evaluating the sources, and synthesizing the information into something which I am reasonably satisfied is true enough. I don’t feel comfortable handing that cognitive task off to a machine. The machine’s job is to help me find the sources, not tell me what the truth is.
Having a machine that tells you what is true is the most dystopian shit ever, and it would’ve sounded completely insane only 5 years ago.
You seem to be describing an answer engine, which isn’t what I said. It’s really no worse than the last five or so years of Google if you just want links to a topic that you can go and read yourself. It’s fine at that, it’s not good.
Yeah, I was talking about the Gemini blurb at the top of Google search results.
To be fair, Gemini is one of the lowest quality pieces of s*** we have. Google also basically gives it no time to do the job.
They’re not magic machines. They take actual f****** time to do something. So of course it’s going to s*** out worthless garbage if you don’t give it enough information to make something good and no time to do anything.
Trying to say that AI is a bad search engine based off Gemini. Is like saying that an artist who is never picked up a pen and paper is worse than someone who’s been doing it for 40 years. Therefore all artists are bad.
It’s f****** nonsensical and ignores the entire actual context of what’s happening.
It takes work to turn them into useful search engines. Set up librewolf. Drop in at least a search and a fetch agent. Wrap it in a some prompts to make sure you get actual links.
On my extremely non-scientific scale I’d rate that setup somewhere between barebones Kagi and pre-enshitified Google in terms of results.
I’m hopeful that an actual agent framework will do a better job that’s significantly more work. If you just log onto a SaaS LLM you’ll get very unpredictable search results.